My project began with documentary and bibliographical research: I looked at manuscripts and early printed sources, modern sources, and recent bibliography, as well as paintings and drawings by artists working in Bologna in the seventeenth century. Using these documents, I delineated the internal mechanisms of the guild of painters, analyzing and evaluating the social boundaries of the Bolognese community, the cost of living, and artists’ pricing policies. My work traces the outlines of artists’ careers by analyzing their social status through
My residency at CASVA gave me the opportunity to finish two chapters of the book, as well as to organize my notes. Exchanges of opinion and comments with colleagues aided me greatly in bringing my original aims into sharper focus and in opening up new paths of research. Particularly rich in suggestions and ideas were long discussions with colleagues working on the critical edition of Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s work.
One of the chapters I finished is a comparison and critical analysis of a fundamental source for the reconstruction of an artist’s career: account books. This type of document speaks to modern-day scholars using a concise language that is nonetheless full of information. Account books of different types—including Bartolomeo Cesi’s
These account records of six artists running throughout the course of the seventeenth century, following one after another with different durations starting on January 1, 1600, represent a highly unusual cluster of sources for the artistic society of Europe in those years. Read in chronological sequence, they give a broad, intriguing picture of the methods, working hours expended, and patrons of these six outstanding artists. They help us in identifying procedures for the organization of work and in examining the choices made by purchasers, merchants, friends, and intermediaries that define more clearly the artistic biographies of the painters themselves and their role in the market.
The other chapter on which I worked at CASVA reexamines a very important and unjustly neglected manuscript account, the Ricordo
Members' Research Report Archive
The Artist’s Portfolio: Creating, Producing, and Earning in Bologna in the Seventeenth Century
Raffaella Morselli, Università di Teramo, Italy
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow, March 3–April 30, 2014
I am investigating the art world of Bologna at the height of its success, its golden age, distinguished by great international figures such as Guido Reni (1575–1642) and Guercino (1591–1666), which lasted from the beginning to about the middle of the seventeenth century. Bologna stood out from the other centers of the production, commercialization, and collection of art because of a sort of cultural autarchy that enabled the guild of painters to take part in an expanding economic system, one that guaranteed everyone a market niche. It was a base of artistic production whose foundations were laid in the fourteenth century, and it continued successfully until the end of the eighteenth century. What changed at the turn of the sixteenth century was the professional identity of artists, their economic status, and the role they played in the business sectors of the city, despite the disaster of the plague epidemic of 1630.
Simon Guillain after Annibale Carracci, The Picture Seller, plate 19 from Cries of Bologna, seventeenth century. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Gift of Belinda L. Randall from the collection of John Witt Randall, R8074